Many businesses use interactive voice response (IVR) systems to automatically respond to customer inquiries. For example, a customer can make a phone call to the IVR system of a business and establish a connection via a public switched telephone network or a cellular phone network. Once the connection is made, the customer can interact with the IVR system to access desired information such as account balance or to conduct transactions such as transfer between accounts. The caller typically responds to the voice menus of the IVR system by pressing the keypad on his telephone set. Very often such phone calls are made using the toll-free number associated with the business and the cost of the call is paid by the business.
There exist other IVR systems which allow the employees of a corporation to access their e-mail by making a phone call to the corporation's IVR system which interfaces with the e-mail server. For example, PhoneSoft Inc. has a IVR product that interfaces with Lotus e-mail servers. The corporation has to pay the cost of the calls which may be long distance when their employees travel.
U.S. Pat. No. 5,537,461, “Information Services Platform”, has recognized that the cost of such phone calls can be greatly reduced by connecting such a call to an information services platform associated with the point the call enters the telephone network so that an inquiry entered by the calling party may be received by a front end of the platform which then passes the inquiry to a back end of the platform for presentation to a called source of information. (This patent is herein incorporated by reference in its entirety.) The advantage is that the voice connection to a conventional IVR system via a telephone network is replaced by an inexpensive data network. But the front end of the information services platform in this patent is not generic. This means that some service specific programs or scripts have to be pre-installed at the front end.
“Phone Browser” from Bell Labs is another system which has the concept of a separate front end and back end. The phone browser together with the front end acts as a Web browser but with no visual information presented to the caller. However, Web servers are the only information source that the caller can access by the phone browser system.
FIG. 1 shows a system diagram of a typical prior art phone browser system 100. The system allows a telephone user to access the Web pages (not shown) residing at Web servers 170 on the Internet. The system works as follows. A caller picks up a phone 105 and dials the phone number corresponding to the URL (Universal Resource Locator) of the Web page that he/she wants to reach. The phone call will be routed by the PSTN (public switch telephone network) 110 to a IVR platform 120 which on one hand interfaces with the PSTN 110 and on the other hand interfaces with the Internet 150, to which a phone browser 160 and a Web server 170 are connected. The phone call will be picked up at the IVR platform 120 by the call handling routine 122 which will find the destined URL by looking up the phone number URL table 124 based on the phone number the caller dialed. The call handling routine 122 then proceeds to establish a session with a phone browser 160 and initializes the phone browser 160 with the selected URL by a proprietary protocol, called V protocol. The phone browser 160 then interacts with the Web server 170 hosting the destined URL by the Hyper-Text Transport Protocol (HTTP).
The IVR platform 120 interfaces with the PSTN via a telephony interface 128 which includes DTMF (Dual-Tone Multi-Frequency) detection, call answering/disconnecting, digital-to-analog and analog-to-digital converters, etc. The IVR platform 120 includes audio functions 126 such as text-to-speech converters, audio players, audio recorders, etc. The information (e.g. text and audio) obtained from the Web server 170 is first processed by the phone browser 160 (e.g., appending a voice menu at the end of the page.) The processed information is then sent to the call handling routine 122 via V protocol. The received information at the call handling routine 122 is presented to the caller after the necessary conversion is done at the IVR platform 120. The caller now listens to the transformed Web page in speech and chooses the next URL by pressing the corresponding touch-tone button on the phone 105 according to the voice menu presented to the caller by the call handing routine 122. The call handling routine 122 converts the received DTMF tone into a digital format (e.g., ASCII text) and sends it to the phone browser for specifying the next Web page. The process repeats till the caller hangs up the phone. If the caller should want to access another service (Web site) hosting by another Web server 170, the caller has to disconnect the call and dial the phone number corresponding to the URL that he/she wants to reach. The aforementioned phone browser system is a service-oriented distributed IVR system, i.e. one service per phone number.
Problems with the Prior Art
Most systems in the prior art have many restrictions and limitations. First, the conventional IVR systems are in general expensive, and the buyers have to maintain the systems in order to make sure that the capacity scales up as traffic increases. In addition, the cost of long distance phone calls will accumulate and may become a major expense for the owners of the IVR systems.
Second, the information service platform described in U.S. Pat. No. 5,537,461 is primarily a solution for telephone carriers. The providers of the information source need to work with their carrier to pre-install service-specific programs or scripts at the front ends. Furthermore, every time the service is changed, the information service provider has to rely on its carrier to upgrade the frond end program. This requirement limits the usage of the information services platform.
Third, the phone browser approach is limited to Web content. There exist many other types of information sources such as non-Internet based e-mail and database servers which cannot be accessed by a phone browser.
Fourth, all the aforementioned IVR architectures are service-oriented, which means that each phone number is associated with a particular service offered by a service provider. Separate phone calls have to be made if the caller wants to access multiple services provided by different service providers.